Street fighting in Mariupol and hypersonic missiles: Ukraine war daily round-up

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in its fourth week, but the city of Mariupol remains under Ukrainian control, despite almost constant shelling by Russian forces surrounding the city.

On Saturday, the city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, told the BBC that street fighting in the city center is hampering efforts to rescue hundreds of people trapped in the basement of a bombed-out theater.

“There are tanks … and artillery shelling, and all kinds of weapons being fired in the area,” the mayor said.

The humanitarian situation in the city is critical. It has no electricity, gas or water, and supplies of food and medicine are running low.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, a Russian attack on a military barracks near the southern town of Mykolaiv is reported to have killed dozens of Ukrainian soldiers. A source told the BBC that around 200 soldiers were sleeping there when three missiles hit the base.

In western Ukraine, Russia said it launched a hypersonic ballistic missile to destroy a large underground weapons depot.

Russian President Vladimir Putin boasts that Russia leads the world in hypersonic missiles, which can travel at more than five times the speed of sound. They can also change direction mid-flight, making it difficult to track.

But analysts told the BBC that the use of a hypersonic missile is not a game changer and should be seen in the context of show business, or even as a sign that Russia’s supplies of other missiles are running low.

Ukraine’s war policy has reached space.

Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station wearing blue and yellow space suits, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

But soon after, the Russian space agency denied having anything to do with Ukraine, saying “sometimes yellow is just yellow,” and explaining that blue and yellow were the colors of the university where the three men studied.

In a press conference broadcast live from the space station, one of the cosmonauts explained that they had accumulated a lot of yellow material, so they chose to use it for their spacesuits.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the world, writes the BBC’s Alan Little in a historical overview of this pivotal moment in history.

“It’s a rare thing,” he writes, “to live through a moment of great historical importance and understand in real time what it is.”

He finds similarities to the war in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbian forces, despite their superior firepower, were unable to overpower the Bosnian defenders of Sarajevo, and instead laid siege to it.

“Is that what the Russians want for Mariupol, for Kharkiv, for Kyiv? To starve them into submission?” Little writes.

In the UK, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said another plane has been grounded while authorities investigate its “possible links to Russia”.

British sanctions against Russia mean that all planes owned, operated or chartered by Russians are banned from flying or landing in the UK.

UK exports of aviation or space-related technology to Russia were also banned.